Slevin - Visions of the human: art, World War I and the modernist subject

Tom Slevin is Lecturer in Photography and Visual Arts atSouthampton Solent University.

The imagination of existence as a human being underwentan identifiable, radical transformation before, during,and after the Modern epoch. In 1913, the French writerCharles Pguy declared that the world has changed lesssince Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirtyyears.This book will consider the interrelation between artistic,scientific, technological, political, philosophic and socio-economicforces and relationships that shaped new ideas of the modernhuman subject .

The visual representation of the human body is a profoundlyimportant index for how human subjectivity, being andexistence have been historically understood within culture. Therepresentation of the body is a site for the dynamic relationbetween subjectivity and society. The body both generates thecapacity for subjective agency, in its embodiment, and is a sitefor its control. As John ONeil writes our bodies are thepermeable ground of all social behaviour, our bodies arethe very flesh of society human embodiment functions tocreate the most fundamental bond between the self and society.The bodys depiction, then, can never be neutral: it is burdenedwith the weight of cultural pressures from its inception. Howeverit is subsequently received, representation occurs in its specifichistorical moment, from a particular relation with a society inconstituting its culture. The image is a site, an artefact, uponwhich analysis can proceed from the imagination of the bodylocated at the convergence of interpenetrating and conflictingtensions, including those political, philosophic, socio-economic,technological, and scientific forces. The subject emerges atthis juncture through the image. It is precisely this view ofthe body, as an index of the historical relation betweenself and society, that helps us understand wider culturaltransformation.

Yet modern technological developments yielded new forms ofknowledge about the nature of reality and repositionedthe human body as the new object of knowledge. Newvisions of the human subject were created through atransformation of knowledge. The unfolding of technology,science and industrialisation within modernity yielded newknowledge about the nature of reality, revealing multiple,simultaneous fields of reality. Consider, for example, how WilhelmRntgens X-ray at the end of the nineteenth-century allowed forthe penetration of visible reality. Upon photographing hiswifes hand, Anna Bertha reportedly remarked: I have seenmy own death! She surely was referring to her skeletalrepresentation and its long symbolic relation to death, but wemight also reflect upon the perceived obsolescence of thehuman body and the failure, in this example, of embodiedperception to know and reveal the world. The perceptuallimits of the body were exposed and supplanted by newvisual technologies. This book will consider the affects oftechnological modernity and the imagination of a modern,human subject as it was represented by avant-garde artistsworking in Europe through different media, both old andnew.

The body has traditionally been neglected in Westernphilosophy, yet it is the founding principle upon which knowledge is based.during and after World War I. In its postwar production,the body became a rigid, yet vacant, site for ideologicalinscription. This new status was governed by a widespreadturn towards classicism, informed by tropes of integrityand cohesion, within an urgent narrative for stability andorder.